Houston
Press

8/26/2010

Ranch Style Beans

Local folk hero is well-rounded, to say the least.

While he remains largely anonymous after 25-plus years on the Houston
art/music scene, Dale "Beans" Barton is, for those who have encountered his wacky, frenetic
performance-art shows, a local icon and people's hero. From the
multi-layered costumes he peels off during his shows as his character
changes, to the painting he completes during each performance — which is
auctioned at the end of the night with proceeds going to the Houston Food
Bank — Barton does it right and for the right reasons.

And not only is it art, it's fun.

Chatter: What was your reaction toRolling Stonecalling your former band Bruiser Barton and
the Dry Heaves the worst rock band in Texas?

Beans Barton: We were crappy and damn proud of it.

C: How did you come up with the idea to do a painting during the
set?

BB: I had the idea to challenge myself and combine all the artistic
avenues I prowl into one show — painting, poetry, music, theater, comedy,
lyrics, operettas and performing. As a bonus, by painting during the lead
[guitar] breaks, I can conserve energy. Besides, no one else on the planet
does it.

C: What does putting a time limitation on making a piece of art do
to you as an artist?

BB: I had to develop a technique that was bold and rapid. The
performance pieces are sudden studies. I have to be quick, agile and
artistically fearless. It's a very visceral method.

BB: Many of my characters began with "The Fat Chance Comedy Show" I did
with Big Skinny Brown. Skinny played local access TV talk-show host Chubby
Chance; I portrayed all of the guests, wearing all the costumes and
peeling down one character at a time. That begat the Bi-peds.

C: Beans hates the sound of his own voice. Has Beans considered
voice lessons or working with an instructor?

BB: Beans doesn't need to sing. Using his thespianating skills, he
talks his songs with verve and elan.

C: You always do a painting onstage during the performance, auction
it at the end of the show, and donate the money to the Houston Food Bank.

BB: We've produced a performance-art piece at every show since iFest
'92, so we've raised a considerable amount of food. It's a win-win-win
situation: The buyer gets a piece of original art with a story and an
IRS deduction, hungry kids get fed, and I don't have to find a place
for another painting.

C: You've done this a long time. Who's your favorite character from
your show?

Between songs, another guy in a floral
dress reads a psychotic sci-fi narrative conjuring conjoined quintuplets
who become one-hit wonders.

A little later, the ex-larva - having
gradually shed layers and assumed a mélange of characters during the
metamorphosis - begins to paint on a canvas.

The violin player embarks on a Hula-Hoop
performance.

It's all in a night's work for local rock
band Beans Barton & the Bi-Peds, which recently celebrated 20 years.

"I need an outlet to get the goofy out,"
says Dale "Beans" Barton, 57, whose band puts on a satirical,
mixed-media extravaganza once a month at Dan Electro's Guitar Bar in the
Heights. "It keeps me young."

And the outfit?

"I find it best to layer in the Houston
heat."

"It's just fun and satire," he says,
sitting at his kitchen table in his Heights home, no costume in sight,
although it's hard to stop staring at his sleeves, which are different
colors. When he's not a layered-look larva, he's a Mr. Mom, waiting for
his kids to get home from school and painting in his studio out back
supervised by Tiger, an orange cat.

Barton is a veteran of other local bands,
including Bruiser Barton and the Dry Heaves, which Rolling Stone once
called the worst band in Texas. He is as amused as anyone that the
Bipeds have lasted 20 years and developed a cult following whose off
spring have become fans, too.

If it seems like the ultimate inside joke,
it is. But anyone who gets the joke is welcome to join the inner circle.

"You either get it or you don't," fan
Chris White says. "It's a niche, that's for sure."

Over the years, fans have become so caught
up in the experience that the line between musician and audience blurs.
Band member Susan Wolfford-Jackson has watched it happen.

"Once audience members figure out that
what is going on is not what they usually see, they assume - and
rightfully - that they don't have to be the regular audience," Wolfford-Jackson
says. "The band feeds off the audience, and if they're having an
exciting time, it helps the band have fun, too."

After hanging around for years, fans
become an integral part of the band.

Originally, Barton had wanted a
distinctive lighting effect, and suggested a friend follow him around
with a "little, bitty spotlight." Instead, his friend returned with a
helmet, a backpack and some very large lights. And the Bi-Bulb was born.

Fan Noah Ramon volunteered to become the
second Bi-Bulb as soon as the job became open.

"Noah just came and danced and jumped
around," Barton says. "He was a high-school kid. The original Bi-Bulb
got sick, so we tapped Noah for the job. But we made him get his GED
first."

Rich Davidson is another audience-spawned
star. After landing roles in three Bi-Peds operettas, the middle-school
theater teacher moved into the spotlight last year as the narrator. He
continues to play many of the women's roles, too.

"I've been with the band nine years, but
now I do a lot of the gibber-jabber instead of just coming on as a goofy
character," Davidson says. "It's a thrill. The idea I can be onstage
with these monster musicians and be accepted as a peer, it's still just
mind-boggling to me."

Although he's been wearing dresses -
including a trademark little black number - for awhile, he has no idea
of his size. "I hold it up and figure if I can stretch into it, it
works," he says.

Wolfford-Jackson believes Davidson does an
amazing job of tying the whole thing together. "I could not fathom
having to keep all those stories straight," she says. "I've been in the
band 20 years and I still get the characters mixed up."

Chris and Lynda White got hooked 15 years
ago, and composed an online encyclopedia about the band's first 10 years
called "The
Encyclopedia Bartonicus aka The Bipedia". Sample entry: "Egg-Bearing
Alien Secretaries: This is the term Bud Pupkin used to describe the
Karankawa who kidnapped him and his family."

Now there's a new generation of Bi-Peds
fans, including Chris and Lynda's son, Ben, 3. "You'll see him on the
dance floor with Wednesday's daughter," White says.

Wednesday Clemens, husband Mitchell and
daughter Kallisti, 3, are there for every show.

"She's only missed two shows in her entire
life since she was conceived," Clemens says of Kallisti. "She was
conceived after a Beans show, and I went into labor after a Beans show."

Clemens was mesmerized from the first
glimpse.

"I thought someone had dosed me with some
acid," she says. "Every time I looked at the stage the guy looked
different and he kept getting thinner. He wasn't the same guy."

Barton fired himself as a musician years
ago. "I used to play bass and guitar, but these people are all so much
better, I had to let myself go. I give them words and they write the
music. I just supply the good looks up front."

Behind all the hoopla is a group of solid
musicians with a sense of adventure strong enough to work with the
ludicrous lyrics and enough energy to pull off a three-hour set. Band
members have backgrounds in local bands Herschel Berry and the Natives,
the Dishes and Dr. Rockit.

Wolfford-Jackson has special skills. She
plays keyboard, violin, theremin - an odd electronic instrument - and
accordion, and navigates the stage and the dance floor on stilts or a
pogo stick.

"I can Hula-Hoop and play violin at the
same time," she says. "I can probably roller skate and play violin and I
might be able to Hula-Hoop and play violin and roller skate - if I
practiced. I cooked onstage once, and we served breakfast. I had a
microwave and a wok, and we served 40 or 50 breakfast tacos during the
course of three songs."

Barton also paints onstage, auctioning the
finished product for as much as $500, and donating the proceeds to the
Houston Food Bank.

Still, potential art buyers should know
that Barton's vision during these shows is severely and intentionally
impaired: "I mostly keep my eyes closed or rolled up in my head, and I
wear sunglasses as well," he says. "I don't want to see the audience
leaving."

The 20th-anniversary show in March was
packed.

"We can't do it if no one shows up,"
Barton says. "And I can't do it around the house. My wife won't let me."

Wolfford-Jackson is amazed the Bi-Peds
have persisted for 20 years.

"My thought is if we do it for another 20
years, it may keep us out of the senior home," she says.

Meet Betty Ferlinghetti, proprietor of
Betty's bait camp, boat ramp, tee-pee motor court, tanning parlor, meat
museum and mystic mud day spa, on the shores of Spawn Lake just outside
of Anahuac. Betty has given birth to quintuplets - from five different
fathers - all conjoined at the head. One of the fathers takes the
magical Dark Guitar and cleaves the quints apart. Each son becomes a
one-hit wonder.

Beans Barton
worms his way into the hearts of fans at Dan Electro Guitar Bar

by Meenu Bhardiwaj

There's no
contest here. Beans Barton, creative force behind underground band Beans
Barton and the Bi-peds, has been performing comic rock 'n' roll theater
for 20 years, as of late once a month at Dan Electro's Guitar Bar in the
Heights. "I find it best to layer in the Houston heat,'' Barton says of
his outlandish outfit. He leads a bunch of talented musicians, actors and
special-effects experts, including Susan Wolfford-Jackson, Wiley Hudgins,
Jimmy Raycraft, Jimb Jackson, Danny McVey, Rich Davidson and Noah Ramon.
Barton also creates a painting during each performance that is auctioned
to benefit the Houston Food Bank. Not everybody gets his three-hours-long
joke, but those who do become obsessed, planning their lives around
performances.

"Painter/musician
Beans Barton -- he of the tuneless, late-period Jim Morrison croak, sundry
crazed alter-egos, and layer upon layer of freakish, ill-fitting costumes --
is an aberration borne of the best intentions. A doting father who spends
weekend nights dressing up like some Sesame Street character gone horribly
awry, Barton deftly walks the line between cheap laughs and high art. He and
his backup band, the Bi-Peds, are Houston's precarious link in a fractured
chain of gonzo-pop performance artists who include Frank Zappa, Captain
Beefheart, and Pere Ubu.

Like the first two, Barton is a
product of the freewheeling '60s, blessed with an irrepressible imagination
and an irreverent sense of humor to match. As such, the bloated rock
experience of that era is his medium. Although his Bi-Peds may never take
their music to the experimental extremes of Zappa's Mothers of Invention, or
Beefheart's Magic Band, they provide an adept conduit for the channeling of
Barton's many and varied artistic ideas.

A good band, after all, isn't
easy to find, and no one knows that more than Barton, who spent the better
part of 15 years searching for his. Sometimes -- as with his infamous
early-'70s stint fronting Bruiser Barton & the Dry Heaves -- a group Rolling
Stone dubbed the worst band in Texas -- he simply settled for what he could
get, bonding with anyone sympathetic to his cause.

Born in Ohio, Dale "Beans"
Barton arrived in Houston when he was eight, his family uprooted to Texas by
his salesman father at the height of the Cold War. He was a shy child, but
exceedingly artistic, taking up drawing at a very young age as a means of
escape. When he got to college, he started with poetry -- wild, unhinged
stuff that his buddies at the University of Houston couldn't begin to
fathom.

He and some pals took up
residence at an impromptu hippie forum in a local park -- first as Bruiser
Barton & the Experience, then as Bruiser Barton & the Dry Heaves. Locally,
the band went on to open for the likes of Ry Cooder, Little Feat, Wet
Willie, and Captain Beefheart. But with little money to be made spewing
Crest and pounding slabs of beef into oblivion, the Dry Heaves eventually
disbanded, and Barton took jobs in construction and as a truck driver. He
tried theater in the late 1970s. But he eventually returned to rock & roll,
forming the Bi-Peds with guitarist Jim Mendenhall (aka Dr. Poison Zoomack).

The Bi-Peds' campy repertoire
of originals includes musty-sounding, guitar-driven rock tunes with
ludicrous names such as "Fuzzy Water," "Makin' Mud," and "Human Stew." All
are featured on 1996's Absolutely Alive, the Bi-Peds' only release in more
than 15 years of performing together. Turns out Barton hates to hear himself
sing."

Beans Barton & The Bi-Peds' Beans Barton
has been at this too long to be "underground." This is his band's 14th year of
performance artistry. And its lineage in Houston goes all the way back to a '60s outfit,
the Dry Heaves. Nonetheless, underground Beans remains. He credits his musicians Jimmy
Raycraft (himself a Houston institution, stretching back to the Dishes), Wiley Hudgins and
Jim Jackson with allowing him to do what he does. What Beans does, for those not yet
initiated, is churn out musically propelled performance art, both for his pleasure and for
that of the Houston Food Bank.

Beans performs as a sequence of characters,
with names such as Dead Earnest and Bass Slackwards, and sings a few songs as each
character before peeling off that particular costume to reveal the next. All the while,
the Bi-Peds are playing straightforward rock music. Beans also paints on stage. And at the
end of each performance (roughly every other Tuesday at Dan Electro's Guitar Bar in the
Heights), the finished piece of "art" is auctioned off with the proceeds going
to the food bank. Beans' pieces typically fetch $200 to $300 in this setting, though $900
has been reached. As Beans himself says: "Not bad for hanging out at a bar till two
o'clock on Tuesday!"

All songs are original, composed by the band
and with words by Beans. And when you combine this with perpetual opener Jimmy Raycraft's
Roaring Calhouns Review, and the Bi-Bulb a cohort who wears two spotlights on his hands
like mittens and cavorts around the stage lighting the show you get a night out which, as
Beans proclaims, "is neither profane nor profound."

Excerpt from Houston Press 1997 Music Awards Preview

Artist: Beans Barton and the Bi-Peds

Nomination: Best Act That Doesn't Fit a
Category

The Bi-Peds are a little like a soap opera
in that it's nearly impossible to comprehend everything that's happening on first look.
Catch the show a few times, though, and you should be hooked.

Sick, funny, surreal and warm, Beans Barton
is a truly lovable and perplexing local legend, and his Bi-Peds sprinkle in just the right
amount of technical expertise and Monty Pythonesque wackiness to complement him. The
recent addition of guitar ace Jimmy Raycraft has only strengthened the group's
qualifications -- and its case for clinical insanity.